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Val, honestly... your kids will probably not thank you for opting out entirely. To some extent you are in anyway if your kids are going to college. Some of my D's friends had pretty awful senior years due to lack of planning and preparation in their families for the college process.

Yeah, I was all over the opt-out bandwagon, too...

until I realized-- and more to the point, my DD realized-- that just going to "Local Uni" meant that her classes were going to be filled by the same caliber of classmates that she's been suffering through in her honors coursework for the past several years.

In other words, she NEEDS for college to be different, and she recognizes that the kids at the homegrown option.... just... aren't bright enough. This trend is a bigger problem than it used to be what with initiatives that have expanded "college-for-all" to include those students who would have been conditional admits at best ANYWHERE when we were in college 25-30 years back.

Well, colleges accept them and do what they can to RETAIN those students now.

Your second to last paragraph sums up EXACTLY why I am busily trying to sock away the moolah right now